The old saying “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” holds water when it comes to how men and women use social media.

Females use social media less than men for business reasons, whereas women use social media to share more personal information than me, revealing more about their personal lives. Women are more vocal, expressive and willing to share. In other words, women are biologically wired for social networking. At least, that’s according to data compiled by FinancesOnline.com

Sounds cliché, doesn’t it?

Generally, females use social networking sites to make connections and stay in touch with family or friends.

Men, by contrast, use social media to gather the information they need to build influence. Social media helps them perform research, gather relevant contacts and ultimately increase their status.

While this explains how they use it differently, but do you know who is more active on social media: men or women?

This may seem like an important question, but if the majority of your consumers are predominantly men or women, it will impact which social channels you would need to focus on.

Men and women have varying degrees of online activity across different sites. 74% of internet users are using social media, with women (76%) having a slight edge over men (72%).

Behind every social media platform stand millions of women – and they certainly seem to love their mobile phones. A Nielsen study shows that women spend nearly 10 minutes social networking through the mobile web, or through apps every day, whereas men spend a little less than 7 minutes.

The diversity may not surprise you, but drilling down to a platform-by-platform level might.

Among internet users, a greater percentage of women use Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter.

For example, 22% of women are active on Twitter, compared to just 15% of men. Facebook, which is used by 71% of the online population, is dominated by women (76 percent) as opposed to men (66 percent). On average, women have more than twice as many posts on their Facebook walls and they have 8% more ‘friends’ than men.

One social network that boasts more men (24%) than women (19%) is the professional-networking site LinkedIn.

Same goes for Google+, but less so. Men are more likely to use it than women, despite only 10% of the internet population spending time on the network, as shown in Quicks Sprout’s infographic below.

Pinterest, not surprisingly, has a more female-centric user base with 33% of female internet population using it, compared to 8% of all men. But the tables turn with Reddit, YouTube and music-based social networking sites in which men are found to be the savviest networkers.

Here’s where it gets really juicy.

Pew, Nielsen, and Burst Media data depict some other impressive stats about male vs. female use of social media. In checking out their sources and data points, we discovered that women are more likely to interact with brands via social media than men.

More than half of women use social media to show support and access deals or promotions from brands, compared to just 36% of the men online.

Not only do women use social media to stay up to date with brands, they also comment on their favorite brands more than men do.

The fact that women are more active on social media than men has held true for at least the last five years. However, it is important to note that women interact in different way and are leading the shift from desktop to mobile where social media is concerned, which is a huge concern for social networking sites launching in the next few years.

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It basically comes down to social networks who emphasize appearance being more popular with women, while social networks who do not emphasize appearance to be more popular with men. It’s no surprise, really. Women reinforce this image themselves. Women do not only easily get a 100 likes, but usually a majority of the likes come from women as well. Men don’t have this culture of liking each other’s selfies.